On any given night, Donald Trump is sure to walk across the courtyard of Mar-a-Lago and say a few words from a rostrum, welcoming a candidate who is paying him for the privilege of raising funds there.
“This is a special place,” the former president said in February at his private club. “I used to call it ‘ground zero,’ but after the World Trade Center we don’t use that term anymore. It’s where everyone wants to be.”
For 15 months, a parade of candidates appeared to pledge loyalty and present candidates. Almost everyone repeated the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.
Trump has turned the former Mar-a-Lago bridal suite into a GOP headquarters, amassing more than $120 million — a war chest twice the size of the party’s National Committee.
While other former presidents have ceded the stage, Trump has done the opposite: he has aggressively pursued an agenda of revenge against Republicans he believes have wronged him, endorsed more than 140 candidates across the country, and turned the 2022 primaries into a test of strength. its influence.
Inspiring fear, accumulating money, doling out favors and trying to crush rivals, Trump behaves like something close to the head of a 19th century political machine.
“Party leaders have never played the role that Trump is playing,” says Roger Stone, an intermittent adviser to the former president since the 1980s who was seen in Mar-a-Lago recently. “Because he can — and he’s not bound by the conventional rules of politics.”
This portrait of Trump as a modern party boss is drawn from more than 50 interviews with past and current advisers, political rivals, Republicans who have sought his support, and party officials and strategists trying to counter his influence.
The politician clearly appreciates power. But, as he repeatedly hints about a third White House bid, the looming question is whether he can remain a kingmaker if he doesn’t effectively seek the crown. Wanted, Trump declined to give an interview.
People close to him say that he derives satisfaction from the mere exercise of power. He listens to top Republicans like Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House leader, and then turns on them without warning. The day after McCarthy reprimanded Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina for saying colleagues had participated in orgies, Trump granted Cawthorn a space to speak at his rally.
Clientelism and pettiness
An entire political economy surrounds Trump today, collecting fees: candidates and federal committees alone paid nearly $1.3 million to hold events in Mar-a-Lago. A phalanx of “counselors” has emerged with candidates who pay them in hopes of tacking meetings together, even as former disciples warn that one must always be careful in a politician’s influence game.
“If someone is selling the ability to get endorsements, they are selling land on the Moon,” says former adviser Michael Caputo. “What appears to be the creation of a ‘new Tammany’ is actually the convergence of consultants who pretend to have a clue to the endorsement — and it doesn’t.”
Tammany Hall was a New York political group that lasted nearly two centuries and owed its longevity to patronage. But Trump can be downright petty: while he does rallies for some candidates, for many his support doesn’t go beyond an email and a check for $5,000.
Taylor Budowich, a spokesman for Trump, says focusing solely on direct spending does not fully explain the value of the “imprimatur” to voters and the “free media coverage” it generates. Not unlike political bosses of the past, the former president focused on electoral mechanics while incessantly sowing distrust in the system with his false allegations of fraud.
Wielding power over the party and selling the fiction of a stolen election also serve to divert attention from Trump’s unfortunate exit from the White House as a loser.
Biographer Michael D’Antonio drew a parallel between that period and his bankruptcy in the early 1990s. “It would have been disastrous for someone else,” he says. “But for Trump it only marked a turning point in method and the quest for power. And he never accepted that they were really losses.”
Democrats are bracing for losses in 2022. But strategists say Trump’s public profile poses a risk to Republicans, as private polls and focus groups show he remains a strong deterrent to undecided voters.
Crabs in a bucket
Nothing reveals Trump’s hold on the party like the genuflections and contortions of those who seek his approval. Some pay to attend fundraisers at Mar-a-Lago for others — clamoring for a fleeting moment of Trump’s attention or a photo.
In many ways, the endorsement chase is a real-life reprise of Trump’s former TV role. “What was ‘The Apprentice’ if not a sad mess of people behaving like crabs in a bucket to be scooped up by him?” says D’Antonio.
Last year, Trump took several Ohio Senate candidates into a room at Mar-a-Lago, where they began attacking each other as he watched. The politician did not endorse anyone and supported author JD Vance. “There are people here who are literally fighting for a vote, from a person who doesn’t vote in Ohio,” Matt Dolan, the only major Republican not vying for a Trump endorsement, said at a debate.
Trump likes flattery and doesn’t stop rewarding flatterers. But people close to him say visually appealing material is also important. Large letters are crucial. With photos and graphics. “He’s not a very digital guy, so we had print,” said Joe Kent, who won the politician’s support for his effort to oust Republican Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington, one of the party’s 10 votes for impeachment.
When he likes what he sees, Trump sends words of encouragement, scrawled in news clippings.
precision television
TV is a popular form of lobbying, to the point where some candidates run ads far from their constituents. When Trump was staying at his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, Arizona Senate candidate Jim Lamon paid for an ad on Fox News in New Jersey.
Idaho Lieutenant Governor Janice McGeachin appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show in June and praised Trump; the next day he called her. The politician says she “suggested” that she planned to challenge Brad Little, the incumbent Republican governor, and asked for Trump’s support; she was soon on a plane to New York for a meeting at Trump Tower.
She says she said Little didn’t fight hard enough to help the former president denounce the alleged 2020 fraud, and then he was in Mar-a-Lago. Trump then endorsed her — though he has nothing but praise for Little, who had attended a fundraiser for an organization days earlier.
The episode epitomizes the quirks of Trump’s style as head of the party: receptiveness to intense courting, haphazard decision-making, with a demand that his false allegations of electoral fraud be amplified.
Heavy hand
With an eye on his track record, Trump increasingly treats Republican candidates as game pieces to be moved, traded, or abandoned.
In North Carolina, Trump tried to get an ally, Representative Mark Walker, to abandon the Senate campaign in favor of colleague Ted Budd to face former Governor Pat McCrory in the May primaries. But after the court altered the state’s political maps, Walker refused, threatening to split the pro-Trump vote — polls show Budd leading.
The former president has already rescinded an endorsement (of Representative Mo Brooks for the Alabama Senate, after he fell in the polls) and may backtrack on others: he has already talked, for example, of softening the posture towards McGeachin.
The disputes in which Trump supported a candidate will be studied for any reduction of his power. But the fact is that many of those he opposes in the primaries are still running as Trump Republicans. Few see an expiration date for his dominance unless he refuses to run again in 2024 or is defeated.
A recent appearance on the Republican National Committee’s podcast captured both the attractions and the disadvantages of the party’s unyielding attachment to politics. It was by far the most-watched episode of the podcast on YouTube — until the site removed it for spreading misinformation.
“The power of your support cannot be underestimated,” Ronna McDaniel, the party’s president, told Trump, adding, “We need you.”
